All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Navigation

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Without JavaScript enabled, you might want to
use the classic discussion system instead. If you login, you can remember this preference.

Please Log In to Continue

I wonder if mapping objects to records is working in this case. This is just brainstorming, so ignore me if lighting doesn't strike.

One random thought is that you could have something that maps bits of SQL and objects that contain these bits of SQL, turning them into full-blown queries only when it's necessary to pull a row. For example, you'd set constraints such as associated with this person's name and matches the previous constraint's office_id field, passing that to a method that builds the appro

Can you give an example? It seems that having objects that contain bits of SQL and then trying to put all of that together is a daunting task. My underlying structure seems sound and it has worked wonderfully. All I do (mostly) is subclass a PersistentObject class, provide some class data and I have 20 to 30 methods instantly built for only about 5 minutes of work. Previously, I was trying to do all of that by hand for each "thing" in the database and it was an absolute nightmare. This is much faster,

Alzabo doesn't support MS SQL Server, which is what I am running on. I had checked out some of the Perl OO Persistence work, but most of it had one or more of the following limitations:

Doesn't support MS SQL Server

Doesn't support an existing schema

Poor documentation

No longer maintained

Tangram [soundobjectlogic.com] looked interesting, but from what I could tell, gradual refactoring wasn't an option as it appears to go from the object to the schema. Existing schemas meant I was out of luck.

It might change the meaning, but it also might be a relatively trivial change that shouldn't affect the overall design of things. For example, with my code, the programmer must explicitly provide class data that maps external names (used in methods), to field names in the database. Here's a map for our "local regions" (note that the field names are not aligned because of difficulties formatting one use.perl). I want <pre> tags:)

You'll note that over the course of time, we've managed to have some field names that are studly caps and others that use underscores. Further, two of the field names have the table name embedded in them (whether or not that is a good thing is a matter of debate). However, the keys here are used to generate nice, consistent method names. I don't have to worry about what it's called internally. Further, if we go back and fix all of the field names to be more consisten, very little of the code changes except for the values in the mapping. In this case, it's not the meaning that has changed, but merely applying a more consistent style.

This is useful because it makes the code more robust. I feel that it's very important to force this decoupling of method names from field names. Further, if the meaning does change and I have to alter the method names, this is not more work than it would be otherwise. It should also be added that I didn't notice Class::DBI when I was checking out the POOP modules. Funny thing, that.